Dolores Claiborne

  "Donald n Helga!" I says. I musta sounded like a TV game-show contestant comin up with the right answer in the last second or two of the bonus round.

  "I beg pardon?" he asks, kinda cautious.

  "Her kids!" I says. "Her son and her daughter! That money belongs to them, not me! They're kin! I ain't nothing but a jumped-up housekeeper!"

  There was such a long pause then that I felt sure we musta been disconnected, and I wa'ant a bit sorry. I felt faint, to tell you the truth. I was about to hang up when he says in this flat, funny voice, "You don't know. "

  "Don't know what?" I shouted at him. "I know she's got a son named Donald and a daughter named Helga! I know they was too damned good to come n visit her up here, although she always kep space for em, but I guess they won't be too good to divide up a pile like the one you're talkin about now that she's dead!"

  "You don't know," he said again. And then, as if he was askin questions to himself instead of to me, he says, "Could you not know, after all the time you worked for her? Could you? Wouldn't Kenopensky have told you?" N before I could get a word in edgeways, he started answerin his own damned questions. "Of course it's possible. Except for a squib on an inside page of the local paper the day after, she kept the whole thing under wraps--you could do that thirty years ago, if you were willing to pay for the privilege. I'm not sure there were even obituaries." He stopped, then says, like a man will when he's just discoverin somethin new--somethin huge--about someone he's known all his life: "She talked about them as if they were alive, didn't she. All these years!"

  "What are you globberin about?" I shouted at him. It felt like an elevator was goin down in my stomach, and all at once all sorts of things--little things--started fittin together in my mind. I didn't want em to, but it went on happenin, just the same.

  "Accourse she talked about em like they were alive! They are alive! He's got a real estate company in Arizona--Golden West Associates! She designs dresses in San Francisco ... Gaylord Fashions!"

  Except she'd always read these big paperback historical novels with women in low-cut dresses kissin men without their shirts on, and the trade name for those books was Golden West--it said so on a little foil strip at the top of every one. And it all at once occurred to me that she'd been born in a little town called Gaylord, Missouri. I wanted to think it was somethin else--Galen, or maybe Galesburg--but I knew it wasn't. Still, her daughter mighta named her dress business after the town her mother'd been born in ... or so I told myself.

  "Miz Claiborne," Greenbush says, talkin in a low, sorta anxious voice, "Mrs. Donovan's husband was killed in an unfortunate accident when Donald was fifteen and Helga was thirteen--"

  "I know that!" I says, like I wanted him to believe that if I knew that I must know everything.

  "--and there was consequently a great deal of bad feeling between Mrs. Donovan and the children."

  I'd known that, too. I remembered people remarkin on how quiet the kids had been when they showed up on Memorial Day in 1961 for their usual summer on the island, and how several people'd mentioned that you didn't ever seem to see the three of em together anymore, which was especially strange, considerin Mr. Donovan's sudden death the year before; usually somethin like that draws people closer ... although I s'pose city folks may be a little different about such things. And then I remembered somethin else, somethin Jimmy DeWitt told me in the fall of that year.

  "They had a wowser of an argument in a restaurant just after the Fourth of July in '61," I says. "The boy n girl left the next day. I remember the hunky--Kenopensky, I mean--takin em across to the mainland in the big motor launch they had back then."

  "Yes," Greenbush said. "It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver's license that spring, and Mrs. Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl, Helga, said she wanted a car, too. Vera--Mrs. Donovan--apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver's license and she couldn't get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn't the case in Maine--that she could get one there at fourteen ... which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?"

  "It was true back then," I says, "although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr. Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday ... was it a Corvette?"

  "Yes," he says, "it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?"

  "I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime," I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera's. "I'm tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight," she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. "Tired of seein how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side."

  "I'm surprised she kept a picture of it around," Greenbush said. "Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving."

  He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy--I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead ... somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they'd been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better'n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob'ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.

  He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.

  Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she'd always known that the argument they had that summer didn't have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver's license; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people's arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what's on the bottom, I've noticed, and it could be that what they were really arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.

  She and the hunky killed the man, Andy--she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there's people inside of families who've got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance ... n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I've tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena's when she looked at me, n I just can't do it. P'raps I will in time, but that ain't nothing I'm really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.

  I do know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver's license--too damned young--and when you add in that hot car, why, you've got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga's, too, as it turned out, when he wasn't but a junior in high school n prob'ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think it was just that because I don't like to think there was fear mixed in with it, that maybe a couple of rich kids like them could blackmail their mother for the things they wanted over the death of their father. I don't really think it ... but it's possible, you know; it is possible. In a world where a man can spend months tryin to take his own daughter to bed, I believe anything is possible.

  "They're dead," I said to Greenbush. "That's what you're telling me."

  "Yes," he says.

  "They've been dead, thirty years n more," I says.

  "Yes," he says again.

  "And everything she told me about em," I says, "it was a lie."

  He cleared his throat again--that man's one of the world's greatest t
hroat-clearers, if my talk with him today's any example--and when he spoke up, he sounded damned near human. "What did she tell you about them, Miz Claiborne?" he ast.

  And when I thought about it, Andy, I realized she'd told me a hell of a lot, startin in the summer of '62, when she showed up lookin ten years older n twenty pounds lighter'n the year before. I remember her tellin me that Donald n Helga might be spendin August at the house n for me to check n make sure we had enough Quaker Rolled Oats, which was all they'd eat for breakfast. I remember her comin back up in October--that was the fall when Kennedy n Khrushchev were decidin whether or not they was gonna blow up the whole shootin match--and tellin me I'd be seein a lot more of her in the future. "I hope you'll be seein the kids, too," she'd said, but there was somethin in her voice, Andy ... and in her eyes ...

  Mostly it was her eyes I thought of as I stood there with the phone in my hand. She told me all sorts of things with her mouth over the years, about where they went to school, what they were doin, who they were seein (Donald got married n had two kids, accordin to Vera; Helga got married n divorced), but I realized that ever since the summer of 1962, her eyes'd been tellin me just one thing, over n over again: they were dead. Ayuh ... but maybe not completely dead. Not as long as there was one scrawny, plain-faced housekeeper on an island off the coast of Maine who still believed they were alive.

  From there my mind jumped forward to the summer of 1963--the summer I killed Joe, the summer of the eclipse. She'd been fascinated by the eclipse, but not just because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Nossir. She was in love with it because she thought it was the thing that'd bring Donald n Helga back to Pinewood. She told me so again n again n again. And that thing in her eyes, the thing that knew they were dead, went away for awhile in the spring n early summer of that year.

  You know what I think? I think that between March or April of 1963 and the middle of July, Vera Donovan was crazy; I think for those few months she really did believe they were alive. She wiped the sight of that Corvette comin outta the quarry where it'd fetched up from her memory; she believed em back to life by sheer force of will. Believed em back to life? Nope, that ain't quite right. She eclipsed em back to life.

  She went crazy n I believe she wanted to stay crazy--maybe so she could have em back, maybe to punish herself, maybe both at the same time--but in the end, there was too much bedrock sanity in her n she couldn't do it. In the last week or ten days before the eclipse, it all started to break down. I remember that time, when us who worked for her was gettin ready for that Christless eclipse expedition n the party to follow, like it was yesterday. She'd been in a good mood all through June and early July, but around the time I sent my kids off, everythin just went to hell. That was when Vera started actin like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, yellin at people if they s'much as looked at her crosseyed, n firin house-help left n right. I think that was when her last try at wishin em back to life fell apart. She knew they were dead then and ever after, but she went ahead with the party she'd planned, just the same. Can you imagine the courage that took? The flat-out coarse-grained down-in-your-belly guts?

  I remembered somethin she said, too--this was after I'd stood up to her about firin the Jolander girl. When Vera come up to me later, I thought sure she was gonna fire me. Instead she give me a bagful of eclipse-watchin stuff n made what was --to Vera Donovan, at least--an apology. She said that sometimes a woman had to be a high-ridin bitch. "Sometimes," she told me, "being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto."

  Ayuh, I thought. When there's nothin else left, there's that. There's always that.

  "Miz Claiborne?" a voice said in my ear, and that's when I remembered he was still on the line; I'd gone away from him completely. "Miz Claiborne, are you still there?"

  "Still here," I sez. He'd ast me what she told me about em, n that was all it took to set me off thinkin about those sad old times ... but I didn't see how I could tell him all that, not some man from New York who didn't know nothin about how we live up here on Little Tall. How she lived up on Little Tall. Puttin it another way, he knew an almighty lot about Upjohn and Mississippi Valley Light n Power, but not bugger-all about the wires in the corners.

  Or the dust bunnies.

  He starts off, "I asked what she told you--"

  "She told me to keep their beds made up n plenty of Quaker Rolled Oats in the pantry," I says. "She said she wanted to be ready because they might decide to come back anytime." And that was close enough to the truth of how it was, Andy--close enough for Greenbush, anyway.

  "Why, that's amazing!" he said, and it was like listenin to some fancy doctor say, "Why, that's a brain tumor!"

  We talked some more after that, but I don't have much idear what things we said. I think I told him again that I didn't want it, not so much as one red penny, and I know from the way he talked to me --kind n pleasant n sorta jollyin me along--that when he talked to you, Andy, you must not've passed along any of the news flashes Sammy Marchant prob'ly gave you n anyone else on Little Tall that'd listen. I s'pose you figured it wa'ant none of his business, at least not yet.

  I remember tellin him to give it all to the Little Wanderers, and him sayin he couldn't do that. He said I could, once the will had cleared through probate (although the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn't think I'd do any such thing once I finally understood what'd happened), but he couldn't do doodly-squat with it.

  Finally I promised I'd call him back when I felt "a little clearer in my mind," as he put it, n then hung up. I just stood there for a long time--must've been fifteen minutes or more. I felt ... creepy. I felt like that money was all over me, stuck to me like bugs used to stick to the flypaper my Dad hung in our outhouse every summer back when I was little. I felt afraid it'd just stick to me tighter n tighter once I started movin around, that it'd wrap me up until I didn't have no chance in hell of ever gettin it off again.

  By the time I did start movin, I'd forgot all about comin down to the police station to see you, Andy. To tell the truth, I almost forgot to get dressed. In the end I pulled on an old pair of jeans n a sweater, although the dress I'd meant to wear was laid out neat on the bed (and still is, unless somebody's broke in and took out on the dress what they would've liked to've taken out on the person who b'longed inside of it). I added my old galoshes n called it good.

  I skirted around the big white rock between the shed n the blackberry tangle, stoppin for a little bit to look into it n listen to the wind rattlin in all those thorny branches. I could just see the white of the concrete wellcap. Lookin at it made me feel shivery, like a person does when they're comin down with a bad cold or the flu. I took the short-cut across Russian Meadow and then walked down to where the Lane ends at East Head. I stood there a little while, lettin the ocean wind push back my hair n warsh me clean, like it always does, and then I went down the stairs.

  Oh, don't look so worried, Frank--the rope acrost the top of em n that warnin sign are both still there; it's just that I wa'ant much worried about that set of rickety stairs after all I had to go through.

  I walked all the way down, switchin back n forth, until I come to the rocks at the bottom. The old town dock--what the oldtimers used to call Simmons Dock--was there, you know, but there's nothin left of it now but a few posts n two big iron rings pounded into the granite, all rusty n scaly. They look like what I imagine the eye-sockets in a dragon's skull would look like, if there really were such things. I fished off that dock many a time when I was little, Andy, and I guess I thought it'd always be there, but in the end the sea takes everything.

  I sat on the bottom step, danglin my galoshes over, and there I stayed for the next seven hours. I watched the tide go out n I watched it come most of the way in again before I was done with the place.

  At first I tried to think about the money, but I couldn't get my mind around it. Maybe people who've had that much all their lives can, but I couldn't. Every time I tried, I just saw Sammy Marchant first lookin at the rollin pin ... n t
hen up at me. That's all the money meant to me then, Andy, and it's all it means to me now--Sammy Marchant lookin up at me with that dark glare n sayin, "I thought she couldn't walk. You always told me she couldn't walk, Dolores."

  Then I thought about Donald n Helga. "Fool me once, shame on you," I says to no one at all as I sat there with my feet danglin so close over the incomers that they sometimes got splattered with curds of foam. "Fool me twice, shame on me." Except she never really fooled me ... her eyes never fooled me.

  I remembered wakin up to the fact--one day in the late sixties, this musta been--that I had never seen em, not even once, since I'd seen the hunky takin em back to the mainland that July day in 1961. And that so distressed me that I broke a long-standin rule of mine not to talk about em at all, ever, unless Vera spoke of em first. "How are the kids doin, Vera?" I ast her--the words jumped outta my mouth before I knew they were comin--with God's my witness, that's just what they did. "How are they really doin?"

  I remember she was sittin in the parlor at the time, knittin in the chair by the bow windows, and when I ast her that she stopped what she was doin and looked up at me. The sun was strong that day, it struck across her face in a bright, hard stripe, and there was somethin so scary about the way she looked that for a second or two I came close to screamin. It wasn't until the urge'd passed that I realized it was her eyes. They were deep-set eyes, black circles in that stripe of sun where everythin else was bright. They were like his eyes when he looked up at me from the bottom of the well ... like little black stones or lumps of coal pushed into white dough. For that second or two it was like seein a ghost. Then she moved her head a little and it was just Vera again, sittin there n lookin like she'd had too much to drink the night before. It wouldn't've been the first time if she had.

  "I don't really know, Dolores," she said. "We are estranged." That was all she said, n it was all she needed to say. All the stories she told me about their lives--made-up stories, I know now--didn't say as much as those three words: "We are estranged." A lot of the time I spent today down by Simmons Dock I spent thinkin about what an awful word that is. Estranged. Just the sound of it makes me shiver.